Beyond Certified Mezcal from Oaxaca

Oaxaca produces 90.5% of all certified mezcal in Mexico. The other eight states with legal Denomination of Origin status — Guerrero, Durango, Puebla, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Tamaulipas, Guanajuato — share the remaining 9.5%. And that is only the certified universe. Destilados de agave, raicilla, bacanora and the vast production happening without papers? Not in that count at all.

If you have been drinking mezcal thinking you are exploring Mexico’s most diverse spirit, you have likely been exploring one state, and often just one agave — espadín / Angustifolia — and one model of production. That is not a criticism of Oaxaca. It is where we have witnessed exactly how the shift happened.

There is a wave happening in specialty coffee that mezcal is watching, even if it does not always know it. Raw Material Coffee — whose Mexican beans you will find at PASSENGER here in Berlin — are doing something that would have seemed niche a decade ago: naming the farmer, publishing what was paid at the farm gate, mapping altitude and microclimate, describing the processing method. They are not selling a roast profile. They are selling a traceable relationship with a specific human being and a specific piece of land.

The third-wave coffee movement had to fight through a commodity mindset first. For decades, one C-market price for all beans, origin irrelevant. It took education and a generation of consumers willing to pay more to taste more. Now single-origin, named-producer, micro-lot coffee is a serious market on its own terms.

Mezcal is not behind coffee on this — in some ways it is ahead. The complexity argument is already there. The cultural narrative is already there. What is lagging is the translation. Most people who order mezcal in a bar still do not know what species of agave is in the glass, let alone the state, the maestro, the distillation vessel, or whether the plant was wild or cultivated. That is the gap. And it is also the opportunity.

Here is what the numbers do not show, but the glass does.

Durango’s cenizo grows on high-altitude mesas and produces an aromatic register completely unlike anything from the valleys of Oaxaca. Tamaulipas’ Funkiana and Univittata are unique to the state. Derrumbes — also in our portfolio — makes a strong stance by representing different maestros across the country, each expression a different journey. Hard logistics to pull off, and worth every bit of it.

In Jalisco, depending on whether you are distilling in copper, clay or hollowed tree wood, using local agave varieties with local woods and local fire, you get radical flavor differences within one single state alone. We love raicilla for exactly this reason. The tobalá, cuishe and tepextate from Oaxaca are just pieces of a much larger board of flavor and tradition.

These are not variations on a theme. They are different conversations — and different species entirely. Different plants, different soils, different altitudes, different water, different generational knowledge about when to harvest, how long to ferment, what fire does to what maguey in what climate. Each mezcalero carries knowledge that is not written down anywhere — it is embodied, oral, inherited across generations. You cannot audit it or fit it in a one-size-fits-all box. But you can drink it.

The plant alone — over 200 agave species, perhaps 50 used in production, growing across wildly different ecosystems — makes mezcal’s raw material the most biodiverse of any spirit on earth. The humans working with it have been accumulating knowledge about those plants for centuries. Certification was meant to protect that. In some ways it did, especially at the start back in 1994. But it has also, inadvertently, made most of what reaches export markets look like a narrow slice of something much larger.

At Agavera, we work with certified and non-certified producers. The hologram on the bottle tells you something about a producer’s relationship with a regulatory system. It does not tell you what is in the glass.

The consumers who will move this category forward — the ones already asking about coffee origin, reading fermentation notes on natural wine labels, wanting to know the farmer’s name — are already here. They just need someone to hand them the right glass and explain what they are tasting.

And that is exactly what we will be doing at the tastings coming up on Reuterstraße. Book your spot and enjoy the ride.